Example embodiments relate generally to optical communication, and more particularly to a polarization-controlled optical channel and to a memory system including a polarization-controlled optical channel.
As operational speeds of semiconductor devices are increased, an operational speed of a bus connecting the semiconductor devices must also be increased to support the high-speed semiconductor devices. For example, it has been necessary to increase the operational speed of a memory bus connected between a high-speed memory controller and a high speed memory device. When the memory bus is implemented with electrical channels, undesired results such as signal distortion, noise, delay, etc. may be serious, and thus reliability of the memory bus may be degraded at desired high operational speeds.
To overcome the limits of electrical channels, optical communication bus systems employing optical channels are under development. Optical communication bus systems may allow for increased data transfer speeds and reliability since optical signals suffer less from interference than electrical signals. Generally, in an optical communication bus system, a plurality of memory modules are coupled to an optical memory bus in order to communicate with a memory controller. In this configuration, power of the transmission signal from the memory controller may be distributed to the memory modules, and thus power consumption may be relatively high.